To the community of Putney; our town, state, and federal elected officials; and other towns taking up the work of understanding systemic racism:
In 2016, the Putney Friends Meeting (Quakers) agreed to hang a Black Lives Matter sign in front of the Meetinghouse. We also agreed that we wanted to become a body that is actively involved to make our Quaker Meeting and our community as whole, active participants in the change that needs to happen to become more anti-racist.
Part of that understanding is that white people in our congregation and community need to learn the history and impact of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, continuing disparities in opportunities for housing and education, and mass incarceration of African Americans, as a result of white American denial and indifference.
We need to understand how the resultant white privilege is not simply a matter of individual acts of blatant violence, but in fact the truth that unwittingly, all white people have inherited systemic racism.